Genocide Warning at Home

Guest Opinion

By Quinn De Vecchi | July 12, 2025

Since January, Trump has deported over 70,000 people in the U.S. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are allowed to hide their identities as they illegally arrest, capture, and deport migrants or others. Some migrants have been detained and still have not been heard from—effectively, they’ve been “disappeared” by the U.S. government and ICE.

The targets of the deportations and detentions are mostly Latin American immigrants. (Trump has been vehement about his feelings toward Latino people.) By focusing on Latino people and people of color, the Trump Administration is essentially partaking in a modern ethnic cleansing of people of color.

Another term for ethnic cleansing is “genocide.” In 1987, Gregory Stanton, a professor at law and the founder and president of Genocide Watch, created the “Eight Stages of Genocide”—then, in 2012, he expanded the list by making it 10 stages. The Holocaust Explained, an educational site created by The Wiener Holocaust Library, delves further into these 10 stages:

1. Classification – Dividing people into “them” and “us.”
2. Symbolization – Forcing groups to wear or be associated with symbols which identify them as different.
3. Discrimination – Excluding groups from participating in civil society, such as by excluding them from voting or certain places. In Nazi Germany, for example, Jews were not allowed to sit on certain park benches.
4. Dehumanization – To deny the humanity of one group, and associate them with animals or diseases in order to belittle them.
5. Organization – Training police or army units and providing them with weapons and knowledge in order to persecute a group in future.
6. Polarization – Using propaganda to polarise society, create distance and exclude a group further.
7. Preparation – Planning of mass murder and identifying specific victims.
8. Persecution – Incarcerating groups in ghettos or concentration camps, forcibly displacing groups, expropriating property, belongings or wealth.
9. Extermination – Committing mass murder.
10. Denial – Denial of any crimes. This does not necessarily mean denying that the acts of murder happened, but denying that these acts were a crime, and were in fact justified.

On the Genocide Watch’s official overview of the United States, they’ve classified our country’s status under “warning.” Genocide Watch writes that the “genocide stage” the U.S. is currently in is “dehumanization,” specifically targeting Native Americans, Black Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latino Americans, and those that are Jewish.

I would argue that the United States has already surpassed stage four, and is already on stage eight: persecution. The ICE units being deployed by the Trump Administration is an example of stage five’s “organization.”

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonpartisan data distribution organization that was founded in 1989 at Syracuse University, publicly publishes immigration reports and statistics within the U.S. Within one report focusing on ICE detention centers, TRAC wrote that at least 49,184 people have been held in detention as of April. And out of that number, a staggering amount of 21,997 detained people have no criminal record at all. TRAC writes on their site, “Many more have only minor offenses, including traffic violations.”

After stage five comes stage six: polarization. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) writes on the topic of media and how immigrants are portrayed. A two-year report focused on the astounding $247 million that was spent on ads targeting immigration. There, they found that “around 20 percent of the ads referred to migrants as ‘illegals’ or ‘aliens,’ with around seven percent choosing harsher words like ‘trafficker,’ ‘rapist,’ or ‘murderer.’”

“Numerous international human rights documents firmly estab­lish the principle that no human being can be ‘illegal’ or outside the protection of the law,” ACLU writes further on their site. “Federal immigration enforcement policies have led to an increase in racial profiling, border killings, and denial of due process rights. Immigrant workers are often abused, exploited, and have become scapegoats and victims of racism and stereotyping.”

While it is unclear whether measures for step seven—preparation—have been taken out by the government, step eight is already underway. Just when Trump was recently elected, he began sending mostly Venezuelan immigrants to Guantanamo Bay.

There, migrants were often living in inhumane conditions. Soon after, many of the migrants were taken out of GTMO and moved to other ICE facilities within the States.

The Trump Administration has also renovated the mostly unused Dade-Collier Training Airport located in Florida’s Everglades to create what they call “Alligator Alcatraz.” Built with disaster relief tents and trailers—and surrounded by the Everglades marshland—the facility could hold up to 3,000 people. Though called an immigration detention facility, “Alligator Alcatraz” matches the Encyclopædia Britannica definition of a concentration camp (britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp).

And now as well, as of June 23, the Trump Administration is allowed to deport immigrants to “third countries”—countries they aren’t even from.

There is no telling when or whether or not the next stages of genocide will happen. But we have seen this happen before in the past with the U.S., going so far back as with the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The only thing we can do is make sure that it goes no further, and that the government finally takes ownership of their actions.

Quinn De Vecchi is a creative writing senior at Interlochen Arts Academy.